If all goes well, a 13-year-old girl may be able to leave the hospital today, but she won't soon forget her ordeal this week. Caylee Kapa has been hospitalized since Tuesday, when she was bitten by a baby rattlesnake at Stony Creek Metropark. "We were coming off one of the lookout points and our friend's grandpa saw a snake," Caylee said. "It was just a baby, so we didn't think anything of it, so I did possibly the dumbest thing ever and picked it up. "We looked at it and it looked very scared so I put it down. My brother had these really thick sneakers on and he thought it would be OK to ... kill it and I said 'No, you're not going to do it.'" Caylee picked the snake up to save it, but the snake bit her. "It was excruciating pain," she said. "I was really scared. I tried not to freak out because I know the venom would have traveled faster (if I did)." Caylee's mother, Cyndi McLauchlan, said Caylee was initially taken to the first aid center at the park. "That's when they decided this was an emergency, because they knew about these rattlesnakes in the park and figured that's what bit her," McLauchlan said. The Washington Township Fire Department was summoned to the scene and Caylee was taken to Troy Beaumont Hospital. "Her hand started to swell and they started to get concerned," McLauchlan said. "They started doing all these tests on her blood but they weren't really finding anything wrong with her. There was only pain in her hand." Doctors contacted a poison control center and were told that, if the tests were negative, that Caylee was "probably OK to go home," McLauchlan said. She was kept overnight for observation and was taken to Royal Oak Beaumont, which is better equipped to handle infectious diseases, on Wednesday. There, 28 hours after the snake bite, the "fourth or fifth blood sample they took started showing there was poison in her body and her blood levels were dropping," McLauchlan said. "They moved her to the ICU unit. They scrambled to find anti-venom to get it in her before anything else took over." Hospital officials attempted to contact the Detroit Zoo, but they were closed. Eventually, they found a hospital in Flint that had enough serum for Caylee and administered it around 11 p.m. Wednesday. "Once they started getting that going, after six hours, her blood was getting back to normal," McLauchlan said. "Thank God they got the serum." McLauchlan said she did not know that Michigan had rattlesnakes. "We have a cabin Up North and she's touched gardener snakes and was not afraid of snakes," McLauchlan said. "It's scary there are so many kids over at Stony Creek and nobody knows there's rattlesnakes, and there's not enough anti-venom around." McLauchlan praised the doctors and nurses at Royal Oak Beaumont, as well as her daughter. "She's handling it quite well," she said. "I'm really proud of her." Caylee, who said she will be cautious of snakes in the future, offered some advice. "If you see a snake that is about nine inches long with very thick black ... circles with a yellow tail, stay away from it, because that is the snake that bit me," she said. "If it does bite you, you have to stay calm. Don't put ice on it. That's the worst mistake you could make." Caylee did put ice on her bite, and it made the pain much worse, she said. "It was scary," she said.